Afterall (Hardcover, Second)

At a dinner party, Beth -- thirty-six, single, and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on -- impulsively announces that she' s going to spend a night on Vancouver' s mean streets " in commiseration of the homeless." Unexpectedly, her hosts' son Mason -- nine years old, small for his age, intense, intellectual and so shy he can' t speak in company -- whispers in his mother' s ear that he wants to go with her. Mason' s parents, good limousine liberals that they are, reluctantly allow him to go. Disaster, of course, ensues.

So begins this fast-paced, tightly wound, funny and quirky first novel from a fresh new voice in Canadian fiction. The action follows a well-meaning but ultimately misguided woman through one night on the streets as she frantically searches for the boy she has lost, ruminates on the shopping cart as a status symbol, loses her shoes, meets a writer, knocks herself out cold, discovers romaine lettuce as a hair accessory, and maybe -- just maybe -- falls in love after all.